Drag Queens On Trial

Not just Drag Queens...

The Kitchen Table Trio have decided to produce Drag Queens on Trial by Sky Gilbert. There may be some who think we are doing it just to have fun, and that’s partly true. It will be a real challenge for the actors to make themselves into real drag queens that the audience can accept as more than parodies. We need the audience to connect with the trials these three characters undergo. You see, although this is a comedy, full of adult humour, there is a real hard truth at its centre - the world likes to judge others...and we are the world!

The production will be staged just after World Aids Day  (December 2013) which also happens to be the anniversary of the birth of Matthew Shepard who would have been 37 this year if he had not been tortured and left to die on a hillside overlooking Laramie, Wyoming in 1998. 

It is my fervent hope that we can not only have a great time staging the play and give audiences a great night in the theatre, but also raise some awareness around bullying, bigotry and hatred. 

I didn’t know Matthew Shepard so why is this project important to me? It’s important to me because I knew Tony and Chris.

It was the early 1980’s, in Berardi’s restaurant on the High Street in Lincoln that Mrs B and I first met Tony.

Tony was a waiter, he was good at his job and he had a way of making you smile and his personality added immeasurably to the gaiety of life.

Tony was a lovely man and when he was diagnosed with HIV, Mrs B and I were able to offer him just a little support.  Some human contact when so much of the world shunned him.


Sad to say it was during this time that I saw how bigoted and hateful some of the people I worked with could be. Refusing to treat Tony as a human being just because of the hysteria surrounding HIV/Aids and the rampant homophobia that could be expressed without fear of any consequences - this was, as I said, the early 1980’s.

Mrs B and I will always remember Tony with great fondness - ‘celery hearts’ always bring a smile. 

Being asked to help carry his coffin on the day of his funeral was something else I shall always remember.

I was volunteering with the HIV/Aids Support Group by then and met and came to know several other men who were facing the end of their life surrounded by the love of friends but also homophobia and bigotry and just plain hatred.

I like to think I did what I could to show them that there was some decency to be offered and accepted from relative strangers. Accepting people for who they are has always been important for me.

It was also the early 1980’s when I met Chris. Chris was a drag queen and like Tony he would die far too young.

I clearly recall sitting in his flat, drinking coffee, whilst he told myself and a colleague about the men that had beaten him up, simply for being himself. 

Jump forward to 1998, Laramie, Wyoming and the death of  Matthew Shepard.
Killed just for being himself.

How many others have been beaten, killed, committed suicide through bullying just because someone else thought they were less worthy of life?  Because their path through life is different - not better or worse, just different.


Drag Queens on Trial is a comedy but behind the laughs it puts us all on trial - it makes the world look at itself and asks us what gives us the right to judge others: gay, straight, drag queen, transexual...whatever you call yourself that is what you are and the rest of the world should just accept it.


So, in December come and see the play but between now and then, and hopefully after, don’t judge others who simply want the same right as you - to be themselves.